By Biko Caruthers
I have to admit that I’m not entirely sure what I think films about race should do in America.
I have seen so many: 12 Years a Slave. Rosewood. The Great Debaters. Malcolm X. Selma. Mississippi Burning. A Raisin in the Sun. Remember the Titans.
In my teen years and early twenties, I think I enjoyed these films because they gave me hope. They made me feel good. I got further encouragement to continue in the hopeful American Dream my freshmen year of college. In the Fall of 2006, I was sitting in my survey level U.S History Course 1492-1865, at the historically Black Southwestern Christian college, when the Professor said, “If you want to change the world, write something.”
Black literature and film encouraged me to focus on the way the world changed. Narratives of progress. Movement from point A to point B.
They led me to believe that Black people will make it out of this horrible reality of racial violence and terror one day . If I could just make white people aware of these violent and destructive racial issues through Black literature and film. Then they’ll see. Then they’ll learn.
I was so wrong.
Scholar and history professor, Peniel Joseph recently wrote a piece for CNN titled, “How ‘BLACKkKlansman’ could help America write a new chapter”. In it, Joseph argued, “One year after Charlottesville, America increasingly resembles itself at the beginning of the 20th Century. Dark signs warn us of the risks heading back toward the days when racial violence in the form of almost 4,000 lynching’s, political corruption, the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan (founded in 1915), the segregation of the federal workforce (imposed by Woodrow Wilson in 1913) all thrived.”
Joseph is correct here, but he never acknowledges the possibility of no further American chapters. We don’t need new ones, we just need America’s chapter writing to end.
As Joseph unwittingly highlights, these chapters are simply markers for the transitions between one form of anti-Blackness to another. Scholar Saidiya V. Hartman argues in Scenes of Subjection that in spite of the “negatory power of Thirteenth Amendment, racial slavery was transformed rather than annulled,” noting that debt-peonage was one manifestation of this transformation.
Our films capture these transitions, or in the words of Hartman, these “transformations.” Both Rosewood and The Great Debaters captured the various racial anxieties at the dawn of the 20th century into the Great Depression era, using scenes of racial violence and terror against Black bodies. The same is true for films like Selma, Mississippi Burning, and A Raisin in the Sun which captured the subjugated state of Blackness in the inter and post-war periods, but the violence and terror was present here too.
Hartman argues, “The encumbrances of emancipation and the fettered condition of the freed individual, at the very least lead us to reconsider the meaning of freedom if they do not cast doubt on the narrative of progress.” BlacKkKlansman can’t do a damn thing for America because it places hope in a failed institution, the Police, who should lead us to question the very existence of Black freedom whenever they assault, and murder unarmed Black people.
In the film, Laura Harrier’s character, Patrice Dumas, warns Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) “You can’t change things from the inside.” Yet Stallworth’s investigation and infiltration into the Klan brought him praise and admiration within the Colorado Springs Police department when he does just that, a feat that overall is presented as celebratory.
But even the film demonstrates that Stallworth’s investigation is nothing more than a marker for transformation. At the end of the movie, Stallworth’s successful investigation unit is disbanded, and he’s told that he’s going to be reassigned to a narcotics unit, a possible nod to the oncoming “War on Drugs” that increased during the 1980s and 1990s leading to mass incarceration, another chapter in America. We are supposed to celebrate the transformation, even when it is shown to be a ruse.
On August 11, 2018. A day after the nationwide release of BlacKkKlansman, Dashawn McGrier was beaten by Baltimore police officer Arthur Williams. Officer Williams was a Black man “on the inside.” Williams decided to take on the role of his oppressors, to brutally attack an unarmed Black man. On August 12, 2018. Two days after the nationwide release of BlacKkKlansman, Police escorted white supremacists safely to a metro station before the Unite the Right Rally, the same white supremacists who killed Heather Heyer last year.
What could possibly come in the next chapter for America if these are our heroes? Policing is a tool used by the privileged to oppress those who have been systematically underprivileged. Police are willing participants in the current ordering of the world, a world that continues to view Blackness as inherently criminal. It has failed to be a force of good.
Professor Joseph ended his article with: “That undiscovered country of freedom, justice and equality for all Americans remains an unwritten chapter in our history. I profoundly hope that future histories will look to Charlottesville as providing the impetus for the further perfection of our union.”
But America and the modern world has always grounded itself in a language that excludes Blackness, and always will. After seeing these films, I am only reminded that I was never meant to be fully included in this world. I have to see past these words and their exclusionary definitions to a different world maintained by a more inclusive language. A language that doesn’t require that the films and literature of Black people be used just to convey its limits and failures.
I don’t want more chapters, I want an entirely new book with a new language for a new man, in a better world. A commitment to maintaining the story of America is a dual commitment to maintaining new forms of terror, subjugation, and Anti-Blackness.
BlacKkKlansman can’t do a damn thing for America because it tricks viewers into believing in a narrative of progress that is possible through the work of heroic cops. We need a commitment to world imagining that does not include institutions like police departments that do the work in maintaining the exclusive definitions of freedom, democracy, and humanity to truly get free.
Suggested Readings:
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America by Saidiya V. Hartman
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe
Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation by Calvin L. Warren
Biko Caruthers is a writer, photographer, and Afro-American Studies PhD Student at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
